Harmony Tuition

There’s so much to be gained from learning an instrument!

🔸When you’re playing the piano, you have to focus on the rhythm, pitch, tempo, note duration, and several other things. Even though your're doing something you acutally enjoy, this is really a multi-level concentration exercise.

🔸 Learning new songs on the piano takes time and effort. Until you can actually play a song fluently by heart, you’ll probably spend several weeks practicing it. As you look forward to being able to play the song, you stay motivated, learn patience, and increase your perseverance. These skills will always help you when you are confronted with difficult tasks at school, university, or at work.

🔸 Playing the piano enhances your listening skills. These are also very important when you interact with other people. Emotions are not only expressed by facial expressions and body language, but also by the tone of voice, the speed of speech, and the melody of speech

🔸 Playing the piano stimulates your brain. While you learn and play songs, the stimulated areas of your brain become larger and therefore more active. The areas that are responsible for the storage of audio information, particularly, are more developed in musicians then in non-musicians.

I love getting messages like this from parents 😍 I still have slots for free online trials next week so message me to book in!

I offer:

🔸Fun & Motivating lessons
🔸Learn music they’ll love
🔸Easy set up
🔸Improve numeracy, literacy and concentration skills
🔸No Keyboard? No Problem - I can teach via keyboard apps or print outs

Enjoying a more relaxed schedule over the holidays and finishing up the term with an online concert! Still making some amazing music with talented little ones whilst school is out so get in touch if you’re interested in a free trial ✨🎼🎹

Working on getting faster and slower this morning 🏃🏽‍♀️🐢 big words for little mouths but lots of fun playing around with these tempo markings!

A little practice motivation ⬇️

Some colourful stickers arrived today for some special end of term student goody bags 😍

Emptying my pencil sharpener for the first time since end of March.. 🤷🏽‍♀️ how strange to have barely marked any music or taken any notes down physically for so long! I’ve found moving all my note taking and annotations online is actually really handy and instructing my students to pencil in their own annotations at home works well too.

This week I’ve been listening to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou’s beautiful piano compositions and learning about here fascinating story!

Emahoy was born as Yewubdar Gebru in Addis Ababa in 1923. She and her sister were the first girls to be sent abroad for their education and she remembers travelling by train, aged six to a Swiss boarding school. Here she first encountered western classical music and turned out to be a talented pianist and violinist.

After Emahoy was refused permission to accept a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London she gave up classical piano and turned to religion, becoming a nun. When she eventually returned to music she created her own compositions combining the classical traditions she learnt as a a child and the religious chants she was singing at the monastery.

Emahoy's first record was released in Germany in 1967 with the help of Emperor Haile Selassie. Other recordings followed with the help of her sister Desta Gebru; the proceeds were used to help an orphanage for children of soldiers who died fighting at war. Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebrou also published her piano compositions in 1973 and used the proceeds from sales of her music to benefit orphaned children in Ethiopia.

The Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation has been set up in her name to help children in need both in Africa and in the Washington, D.C. metro area to study music, they also sell a beautiful book of her piano compositions!

How can we address racism in our own practice as music educators? There’s no one easy or simple way, but we can make a start in acknowledging the work we need to do to best serve our black and poc students and future musicians. I pulled this advice from a research paper examining race in music education whilst studying Trinity Laban and from my own experience as a poc music student and teacher. Feel free to message me for a full bibliography and further reading.

Today’s workstation 🎹🌷